Reflective Encounters

“The widespread confinement during the pandemic lockdowns led to an attendant rise of internet celebrities cheerfully exhorting the virtues of diversionary activities as forms of radical self-care. Learning Tagalog with Kayla’s eponymous character, setting about initiating her viewers into her second language with a stilted perkiness, seems like another such enthusiastic instructor, though the film’s retro-styled cable access TV aesthetic might not initially appear to be situate it within the present times.

However, as Kayla’s sunny façade slips, the film carefully slides into a more phantasmagorical register and unexpectedly becomes her Covid confessional. The disjuncture between her initial composure and her interior ennui as she details the less-than-perfect aspects of her domestic situation speaks of the social masks we all at times feel obliged to wear. So too is there a sense of the acuteness of this obligation for a young Asian-American woman. At the film’s conclusion, Kayla snaps out of her distractedness and her mask returns, but rather than a deception or an admission of defeat it now feels like a quiet triumph: she’s okay with not being completely okay.”

— Jonathan Bygraves